TamsIJungle

Coming from Austria, yours truly has a healthy dislike of government agencies – wherever the government gets involved, idiocy and bloat usually follow suite.

Travelers and gadget heads in the USA will soon enjoy even more of the above-mentioned. PCWorld reports the following:

Buying your next laptop computer or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move.

Airline passengers would be affected too, as rules banning spare lithium-ion batteries in checked-in luggage would also be extended to alkaline and nickel metal-hydride batteries, argues George Kerchner, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Portable Rechargeable Battery Association.

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For air travelers, this means that you are no longer allowed to put batteries or accumulators into checked luggage – which is just insane. More on that can be had at the URL above.

P.S. This is a non-political blog. However, I think that the Terrorists have already won their “war” with us – air travel is such a hassle nowadays that many evaluate taking the train more and more. One can always circumvent security measures if one really wants to.

WebKit is the browser engine used by almost every mobile device – except for Microsoft and RIM’s current devices. It thus is interesting to see which mobile company does all the work…

neugierig.org performed an analysis and ended up with the chart below:

Not much to add here…

Apple’s recent IOS 3.1.3 update can be called a non-update – it fixes errors which can be classified as minor at best. Nevertheless, an adaption of the jailbreaking tools is required in order to get it up and running.

The dev-team doesn’t think much about the upgrade, and recommends users to stay off:

On Tuesday, Apple released firmware 3.1.3 for the iPhone and iPod touches. Unless you’ve personally observed a problem with the reporting of your battery percentage, there’s no reason to update to 3.1.3. We know some of you will want to anyway. Superbowl Sunday’s PwnageTool 3.1.5 for Mac OS X will let you do so safely, preserving your jailbreak and ultrasn0w unlock. (If you use the blacksn0w unlock (at baseband 05.11.07), you need to stay at 3.1.2.)

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We aren’t revealing any new exploits to Apple with this jailbreak. Everything here has been used before, it’s just a straightforward port of Pwnage2 and 24Kpwn to the new firmware. It’s possible the new firmware was released largely to flush out new exploits before the next big release. We won’t be biting.

We’d really like the above warnings and disclaimers to sink in. Please don’t download the files below and use them blindly.

Hit the link below for further info on the somewhat complex process:
http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/376648600/pre-game-show

Apple’s iPad caused a media frenzy before it was released – now that the critter is out, interest seems to wane.

A company called Retrevo has performed surveys before and after the release of the iPad – and found astonishing results:

When asked whether they would “need” an iPad, the situation doesn’t look too good for Apple:

And finally, we now also know why AT&T was so glad to support the iPad. They know that very few people will actually use the 3G radio:

Of course, this data is from just one source – nevertheless, hit the link below for further info:
http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2010/02/apple-ipad-hoopla-fails-convince-buyers

Amazon has just sent out a few invites to developers who indicated “interest” in the Kindle – it offered a further form, offering you to “apply for a place” in the Kindle developer test program.

Amazon has now posted an FAQ for Kindle developers – the most relevant questions are below:

# What APIs are available to me in the KDK?
The KDK is comprised of two sets of APIs:

* Java version 1.4 Personal Basis Profile (PBP) APIs for mobile devices.
PBP JavaDocs can be found at http://java.sun.com/javame/reference/apis/jsr217/.
* Kindle custom APIs which complement the PBP APIs and provide UI components, JSON and XML parsers, HTTP and HTTPS networking, secure storage, and other features. Other APIs like audio and dictionary access will be available in a future release of the KDK.
KDK JavaDocs can be found at http://kdk-javadocs.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html.

# I’ve already built a Java Micro Edition (J2ME) application. Can I port it to Kindle?
Yes. You should be able to modify existing Java applets and J2ME software to run on Kindle.

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As of now, Tamoggemon has not been accepted – stay tuned!

The game of Apple and Verizon is never-ending. I grow tired of it – but the latest bit of news via barrons.com is below:

Credit Suisse analyst Jonathan Chaplin this morning cut his rating on Verizon (VZ) to Neutral from Outperform, and cut his target on the stock to $30, from $32. His primary reason: a shift in his thinking on when AT&T (T) will lose its exclusive hold on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone in the U.S.

“Our analysis suggests that Apple will eventually sell the device at all carriers; however, there is a much greater probability that AT&T keeps exclusivity for another 12-18 months than investors realize,” he writes. “We think this has profound impacts for Apple, the carriers and the other handset OEMs.”

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Not much to add here…

Here is the latest bit of news from the iPad front:

VodaFone UK interested in iPad
First of all, we now have another carrier partner for the iPhone. Mobile Business Briefing claims the following:

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The Guardian reports that Vodafone has set its sights on selling the Apple iPad in the UK after its success with the iPhone, which it started selling in the UK last month. Speaking after the world’s largest mobile phone company by sales announced better-than-expected third-quarter results, chief executive Vittorio Colao said he was “very interested” in the iPad, which Apple boss Steve Jobs unveiled in San Francisco last week.

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Amazon to release touchscreen Kindle
The second – and just as interesting – bit of news is that the NY Times reports that VodaFone may soon release a touchscreen Kindle…

Don’t ask me why, but a disproportional amount of interesting figures released is related to Apple. Here are the latest…

A report from Reuters now states the following:

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Telefonica’s (TEF.MC) O2 mobile operator has sold 2 million Apple (AAPL.O) iPhones in Britain and seen good sales of the Palm (PALM.O) Pre smartphone, helping it to enjoy a good end to 2009 in the UK.

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CNet picked up another interesting bit of stats:

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In a research note to clients on Wednesday, Needham & Company’s Charlie Wolf predicted Apple would sell two million iPads in fiscal 2010 and an additional six million devices in 2011, according to a report on AppleInsider.

What’s interesting is that Wolf says more than half of the iPad sales would be drawn from the iPod Touch. …

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Not much to add here…

As usual, our friends at BrightHand’s have just released their mindshare stats.

The top-ten is below – as always, the position in brackets refers to last month’s place:

1. HTC HD2 (1)
2. Samsung Moment, Android (3)
3. Nokia N900 (2)
4. BlackBerry Curve 8530 (new)
5. Nokia E63 (9)
6. BlackBerry Bold 9700 (6)
7. Motorola Droid, Android (4)
8. BlackBerry Bold 9000 (returning)
9. Nokia E71 and E71x (returning)
10. Samsung Omnia II (10)

Apple’s announcement to use a micro SIM in its iPad caused quite a bit of waves in the mobile industry – no other box has used this smaller format so far.

The illustration on the left shows the site difference – and CNET reports the following:

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The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which sets the standards for SIM cards, tells us that except for the size of the plastic around the chip, micro SIM cards are identical to the SIM cards we normally find in phones.

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This means that you can cut existing SIM cards to size – have fun, tinkerers!

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Justin Ormont